When we say a person is cosmpolitan, what do we mean? That they share cosmpolitan values, they hail for a cosmopolitan place (city). So the definition isn’t pegged to the user, but to a space (physical, virtual, abstract) or a set of ideals, values. And cosmopolitanism is often referred to as a positive thing, especially in a capitalist context: it hails (or tolerates?) diversity, it’s large or embedded within a larger superstructure, everything is fast-paced, a city that is broad and deep enough to make people from every corner of the world find their niche and/or feel reasonablt comfortable. It also gets a bad rap around over-crowding and congestion, and a serious lack of community. But, honestly, these two things are effects and not defining traits: you can, theoretically, have the perfect city that minimizes congestion and over-crowding through centtralized planning (though I doubt it, thanks to James Scott), and allows for the fostering of communities at scale.
I feel like all of these translate pretty well to identifying what this looks like on the internet.
Diversity: The space has (active) users from different corners of the world and the platform itself. While identifying people who come from different spaces is doable, identifying the stricter definition is much more tricky.
Houses multiple niches: This is a spinoff from the diversity point, with the key difference being that the space would foster or cater to a variety of ideas. It’s a big tent. The stricter version of this is inclusive/active diversity: it has to house opposing views and let them thrive and interact in a safe manner, with certain limits. Another question is whether they have to house or simply host them: it might not be the home of these diverse viewpoints, but it allows them to interact freely (the downtown-suburbia model). Capturing this in the data is very tricky, since you need to recognize these niches, contrast them with others, and check their relative frequencies.
Fast-paced, Congested: A high volume of content per second. Trends move ridiculously quick. Also creates congestion in that you have little to no control over what’s happening around you. You muight be stuck somewhere with no option but to let the crowd move around you. The sheer size of the data should be a dead giveaway, with waaay too many interactions happening per second.
Lack of community: The sheer size and volume of interactions and activity mean that it’s difficult for you to form meaningful, recurring bonds in these spaces. You might be better off doing that elsewhere, and if you carry them over into this cosmopolitan place, good for you. But don’t expect to make and secure those bonds just here. This should show up in the data as a lower volume of repeated interactions between a set of users than in other places.
Reddit is a large place, so I don’t think size is a sharp indicator of anything, even if I’d have to specify a size cutoff eventually. I expect big-tent communities like r/AskReddit and r/pics to showcase all of these traits. They might be worse off in the niches department, because they might be strictly regulated to keep combustible topics away. I would also expect them to be bad on the community front.
I’m unsure when it comes to broad-themed subreddits, like r/politics, r/soccer, r/GameOfThrones. I expect them to be cosmopolitan since they are based around broad, populat interests. But it might foster a sense of community under the right settings. More importantly, I think these spaces are gateways to subreddits which are more homogenous and insular, for good or for worse.
Who’s Cosmopolitan though?
A user whose home community is cosmopolitan? That feels circular. Someone with wide enough participation and closely affiliated with a cosmopolitan community? I’m not entire;y sure. Let’s see what this looks like in the data with distributions.
TBA. Still working on it. I’ll update this when I do get results.